READER’S CORNER: Ballooning health crisis

Since the NSHA doesn’t know how many doctors are in practice in the province, they can’t guess at how many Nova Scotians don’t have a doctor. How can you fix a problem you can’t quantify? (123RF)

In a former office, my editor kept a book on his desk called Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics. Often, people are lost to the anonymity of numbers and spreadsheets. Such it is, I believe, with Nova Scotia’s doctor shortage.

Recently, Corporate Research Associates said 13 per cent of Nova Scotians don’t have access to a family physician. To be a little more specific, that’s approximately 133,500 Nova Scotians without a doctor.

To further quantify that, consider that according to the 2016 census, the entire population of Antigonish, Annapolis, Digby, Guysborough, Inverness, Queens, Richmond, Shelburne, Victoria and Yarmouth counties, as well as the town of Wolfville, equals 132,856 people. Imagine all of those people without access to a physician.

In October 2016, a Freedom of Information request found that 20 per cent of the residents of HRM and 14 per cent of the province’s rural residents didn’t have access to a family physician. That breaks down to 155,415 people without a doctor (78,019 in HRM, 77,396 rural residents).

To put a face on what last October’s figures represent, consider that the entire population of Kings, Annapolis, Digby, Shelburne, Queens and Lunenburg counties total 155,232 people.

One of the problems in attempting to quantify the doctor shortage is the Nova Scotia Health Authority’s inability to say how many doctors there are in the province. In April, a NSHA representative said, “Given daily changes with retirements, deaths, relocations, etc. and the complex roles that family doctors play, this number fluctuates regularly. On any given day in Nova Scotia there are more than 1,000 doctors seeing patients in a family practice. If you include specialists, there are more than 2,600 doctors in Nova Scotia.”

The NSHA added that as independent contractors, physicians are not employees. NSHA tracks vacant positions by zone, but “does not maintain a centralized list of physicians. We do work with family physicians to better understand when they are planning to retire or leave the province.”

Adding to the confusion is the reliance on the Physician Resource Plan published in 2012. Family physicians complain that this relies on data gathered in 2008. Almost 10 years later, we’re still working with this data and these numbers. One of the frightening numbers in the Resource Plan is the prediction that by 2021, our medical needs will equal those of 1.1 million people. Roughly 600,000 more people than live here now. That’s basically the population of Halifax, Hants and Kings counties. That 1.1 million figure is based on needs of older residents, and is not representative of an actual growth in population.

Since the NSHA doesn’t know how many doctors are in practice in the province, they can’t guess at how many Nova Scotians don’t have a doctor. How can you fix a problem you can’t quantify?